Evil Ihe wind, and bitter the se,a, and grey the sky,
grey grey grey.
The intensity mounts, the poet's thought is sensual-
ized and transmuted into emotion. Eliot's civiliza-
tion smells the detah-bringers, its values disintegrate:
I
have tasted
The savour of putrid flesh in the spoon.
I
have felt
The heaving of earth at nightfall,
restless, ab-
surd.
I
have heard
Laughter in the noises of beasts that make strange
notses: jackal, jackass, jackdaw; the scurry-
ing noise of mouse and jerboa; the laugh
oj
the loon, the lunatic bird.
I
have seen
Grey necks twisting, rat tails twining, in the thick
light of dawn.
I
h(J!Ueeaten
Smooth creatures still li'tling, with the strong salt
taste of living things under sea,
and further:
I
have smelt
Corruption in the dish, incen.se in the latrine, the
sewer in the incense, the smell of sweet soap
in the woodpath,
a hellish sweet scent in the
woodpath,
while the ground heaved.
I
have
seen
Rings of light coiling downwards,
leading
To the horror of the ape. Have
I
not known, not
known
rVhat was comi1lg to be?
From the arteries of "God," cut open, streams the
blood of secular humanity. This is an apocryphal
vision of a death as much feared as desired. With
this the play hooks itself on to the positive elements
of our reality, that death's
necessity,
and the poet,
though pining for relief in the lap of the infinite,
begets his bastard child-a prophetic sense of our
age.
Moreover, what has become of the Christian man,
man in the singular, that
identical
creature of dog-
rna? Why does the chorus harp upon the image of
the "common man," the "small folk"? Throughout
the action Eliot-Becket, the clerical philosopher,
answers the complaints of those "who acknowledge
themselves the type of the common man" in con-
trast to those who walk "secure and assured" in
their fate. Who hatched this heresy of a plural man,
veritably a class conception in disguise? Has Eliot
heard of the role of the masses in history, of their
refusal to become the fodder of eternity? Is the
image of the small folk the poet's bad conscience?
Archbishop,
secure and assured of your fate, un-
aff1·ayed among the shades, do you realize
what you ask, do you realize what it means
To the small folk drawn into the pattern of fate,
the small folk who live among small things ...
The protest of the commoners, however, always
meets the stopgap reply: The sin of the world is
upon your heads. Yet it is in the self-portrayal of
these plebeians that concrete life emerges. Some-
times the corn fails them, one year is a year of dry-
PARTISAN
REVIEW
ness, another of ram, there have been oppressIOn
and taxes, girls have unaccountably disappeared,
still they have gone on living, "living and partly
living." (This word
pa,rtly,
denatured, unpoetic,
recurs throughout and throughout turns into its op-
posite. Loaded with the burden of the real, it vio-
lates its many "poetic" contexts, thus animating
them with a superior poetry, the genuine poetry of
surprise and humility.)
The dislocation of the poet's intention continues.
We do not feel the "joyful consummation" heralded
as the play ends. The formal cause of the horror
expressed by the chorus-the crime of murder abso-
lutized in "an instant eternity of evil and wrong"-
remains an abstraction. The horror is not realized
as such, its language is nowise equivalent to the
peculiar logic of its indicated motivation. History,
ever determinate, will not be cheated of its offspring;
though the poem recoils from history, only history
can give it life. And in his essay on Baudelaire, Eliot
has himself perceived why this is so. Though Baude-
laire, he says, was the first counter-romantic, he was
still inevitably the child of romanticism. If the poet
is sincere, "he must express with individual differ-
ences the general state of mind-not
as a
duty,
but
simply because he cannot help participating in it."
I have suggested a creative contradiction in Eliot
that makes him our contemporary in more than a
chronological sense. Yet there are many whose dis-
torted critical ideas allow them to see only explicit
ideology in a work of art, and unable to share the
poet's beliefs, they find themselves unable to enjoy
his poetry. This is the real reason for the crude
treatment the play received from some of the left
critics. What these critics don't see is that their
approach isolates them from literature as an his-
torical entity, particularly from the literature of the
past. We can understand the immediate pleasure a
critic gets from an ideological correspondence be-
tween himself and the work he criticises, but let him
beware lest this immediate pleasure become a vice
blinding him to other and related values.
As against Eliot's bleached heaven of dissolution
in the supernatural, young Mr. Shaw fashions a
heaven on earth out of the potentialities of man and
the movement of history. Becket would not be denied
of his death, and he counters the counsel of the
priests to save himself, with his longing:
I
have had a tremour of bliss, a wink of heaven, a
whisp,er,
And
I
would no longer be denied ...•
But in
Bury the Dead
the dead soldier Driscoll, on
hearing his wife reproach him for losing his religion
and for the "edge of arrogance" in his speech, an-
swers in simple words: "I have heaven in my two
hands to give to men. There's reason for arro-
gance." And the dead soldier Shelling refuses burial,
for he has not had his fill of "lookin' and smellin'
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